Addicted to Consumerism – Money Spent in Superficial Stuff

Twin sisters. Even though both heading in the same direction, Sonia and Malika are split. One takes wrong roads, the other takes shortcuts. Are they both gonna end up parked in the same one way lane?

Sonia and Malika chase the superflux. Their audacious looks wants to win a prize. Their styled dresses are modernized with dollar bills tattooed on their bums and a squared cut fringes around the eyes covers their brain’s informing ears.

Their vitrine isn’t street smart because they shop in double glazed windows cars, to stop the wind from moving their pink powder around their thinly plucked eyebrows. A chic combed pair of twin sisters, classy walk like they came out of a boutique, not a womb. And to take their breath away, love must be purified from dirt and debt and depth.

Sonia married a wallet. Since birth, Malika has been five minutes behind Sonia. Thus, as usual she followed, and five months later she got married too, to a job title for the status. Apart from passport information and resumes, neither of the twins can explain who they are living with and what they signed up to.

But it doesn’t matter. Lots of credit cards and shopping time is included in the contract is what counts, numbers as satisfaction. Plus, the prenup lawyer stated there is a bonus available, winnable through divorce. In contrast to falling in love and marrying in a Las Vegas chapel, which does not guarantee this type of ‘all in’ deal!

One year and the confetti has dried up. On the surface, Sonia appears to live a well polished existence, however, down under she is depressed through boredom and spends her time figuring out how to add at least sixteen years worth of shopping lists to her schedule. Sonia decided to birth a child.

Malika’s wedding and life in general have fallen short of her expectations. For once she paused the blindness that glued her to following Sonia and took a step back from the swallowing abyss full of superficial stuff.

Malika cracked out from the luxurious trappings and cosy nest, where eggs shells can’t break, and won’t let breath her inside heat. Instead of planning to fall into pregnancy and warm up the loneliness that wanders into large spaces, she bought a chihuahua.

Malika is no more a mimicking idiot without a stance! Only if the chihuahua’s barking is bearable and if Sonia’s child brings her happiness as opposed to more problems, will she too carry one.

According to common values, such a standpoint paints Malika as a cold hearted woman. Well it’s untrue; she does love children and wishes for one but for her, mothering doesn’t mean ordering a programmed doll as a means to repairing relationships, or a self fulfilling prophecy. Malika’s heart knows that a child has one too, it comes accompanied by a soul with its own path to follow.

Two years later and still Sonia is depressed. She’s full of herself at fooling herself for being always right, never apologizing or giving without an ulterior motive. Sonia is bored. To feel useful, she hired a nanny, a chef, a gardener and a cleaner. And to feel loved she has a lover who covers the night shifts while her husband is away on business trips.

For an emergency, where raw emotions and truthful memories erupt, Sonia visits a therapist to anesthetize her lucidity back into her unconsciousness. Subconsciously, she thinks of a second child, a dressing room extension and a new hair color to remedy to her chilling existence.

Sonia’s primary goal in life is to pile up, to accumulate, more than others. Keep the ugly in storage and to show off only the renovated and beautiful. But underneath her layers of makeup, black holes live; frightened and hungry shadows. She feeds them and they keep asking for more and more.

Now that he’s wearing a muzzle as a last resort before throwing him out of a window, Malika loves her chihuahua, that’s why she named him EDN for “Ear deafening nuisance.”

If only her husband was making some noise instead of sneaking back into bed before dawn, pretending that his office walls can’t stay standing without him, Malika wouldn’t sleep eyes open staring at the red alarm clock numbers. She wouldn’t have acne caused by one too many Gin tonics. And, she would be the lover and the wife and the mistress she is supposed to be, not the part time casualty she is slowly becoming.

Malika wouldn’t have lost the pleasure of collecting things, in holidaying around the world without leaving the Club Med area. She could halt acting to have something she doesn’t have, playing the role of someone she is not.

Sonia won’t stop accumulating and filing closets, as if it was going to fill her own blank white sheets of happiness. Contrary to Sonia’s stubborn mission, Malika knows a child in this mess will grow up to be a messed up one, and it won’t make the mess any neater. By contrast, it would mark as a permanent stain in the midst of a white sheet.

For the most part Malika is always five steps, hours or days behind but for once in her lifetime she went ahead… She has thought for herself, taken the lead, unleashed the dog and divorced the ghost of a man she lived with. She donated her superficial stuff to charities and a…

Realization did occur to her – whatever she does and has, wherever she goes and whoever with, everything leaves and Malika isn’t satisfied. No doubt in her mind that to deal with this situation, she must clear the slate, start over, unwear the past and move forward naked and bare.

Of course, Malika scored half an island as part of the divorce settlement. Her husband didn’t complain, finally he’s free to invite young and loud models home and a mutual agreement is a bargain compared to a jealous spouse who constantly makes accusations of adultery.

Remembering her favorite bedtime story: “Robinson Crusoe”, Malika managed to build a home in the wild. On the andandonned island, the divorcee sits in a wooden hut next to a shadow, hers. Like the glamorous, the adventurous style went amiss as she broke her nails and the long velvet lookalike hair extensions have been cut and hung by tree branches.

Alone on an island, Malika is surrounded by self reflections. She wished she had brought books rather than a pile of gossip magazines so uses them as charcoal for a fire. She drinks raw coconut milk, a nourishing substitute for the Long Island cocktails to which she had been accustomed to.

When a sudden truth strikes her thoughts; it comes from the heart, she feels there are plenty of mystery waiting to be uncovered in that organ and there are answers that sleep, waiting to be woken inside her head.

Malika wonders – can happiness and meaning exist somewhere within herself, somewhere lost to inner turmoil and the exterior of chaos…?

In the beginning, Malika missed crowded places and the sound of heels clacking the ground. The sole change she noticed was that her emotional state has gotten worst. After days spent planting seeds, collecting fruits for breakfast, handwashing after lunches and fishing for dinners, she missed playing Candy Crush for dessert.

She dwells to a spider about her cell, with a tone of regret to have not packed a tablet or laptop instead of the object that could easily be mistaken for a remote control. What a shame that the handset sitting in her hand is only able to do what a phone is supposed to do: make calls.

To top it all, as a result of dropping all gadgets, lots of Malika’s friends dropped her, as if she were a gadget. The only number she has to call belongs to Sonia, The Depressed.

In tears now Malika thinks of quitting. The plan drawn up in her mind – ask Sonia to send over a rescue helicopter, a bubble bath, home cooked food and a selection of new designer dresses. But after that, then what? Surely the emptiness, the feeling of uselessness will return and the missing link to wholeness will remain unfound.

Determined to prove herself to herself, Malika is fed up playing second act. This island is the platform on which to show her older sister (by five minutes) Sonia, what for years she has been waiting to show her: that ‘she’ too can initiate. And who knows, one day Sonia may follow for a change…

Malika is exhausted from her tearful, meltdown. She swims into a pool full of emotional bursts. She rests on burning sands, she hangs on to rocks and her feet touch the water that laps from the sea’s waves. She experiences bliss in this simplicity and without even knowing it, feels the breeze she has sought all along.

The sun’s yellow rays pour down onto Malika’s crown and she lays down under this energizing act, enrobed in protection by the illuminator of the love that dances around each of her breaths. Without asking for an exchange, a price to pay, conditions to agree to or judgements to endure, her whole body is full and her mind appeased and in peace.

After years of racing with molten legs, attempting to jump over the barricades that kept the bliss at bay, Malika skipped the racetrack and a new path opened accompanied by a feeling of belonging. Alone but nonetheless loved among the stars, she learns that when you are alone you feel the least alone. Truths surface and once faced, bliss appears.

During Malika’s journey towards bliss, Sonia concluded that the cause of the unhappiness in life was due to her husband’s lack of ambition. Therefore, she remarried a richer but less available man. She also multiplied the help, swapped houses, homeschooled the kids by building a school in the back garden and increased her closet count significantly. Bless Sonia because to this day, she is still depressed and bored and sadly, she won’t look inside herself for the source of her problems.

That said, Sonia visited Malika’s island, however, she has so many layers of steel around her that it would take the sun months to warm that heart and melt it even just a little bit. Sonia’s tastes wouldn’t allow her to sleep in a hut without a bed or water mattress and no jacuzzi for more than a weekend. She declared Malika lost and mad.

Sonia got a facelift and still lives with a dark heart, consumed by the superficial and plastic. Malika lifted her heart and younger than ever she consumes love in great abundance. The twin sisters care for each other from a distance and sometimes Sonia calls Malika. Who knows, one day she may return to the island to join her sister…